


Deep in the Golden Evening

by Nympha_Alba



Category: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Genre: First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:10:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nympha_Alba/pseuds/Nympha_Alba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I do think about it from time to time - the things that should have come to pass and never did, and the ones that did. But only the happy memories. Never the dark and troubled ones. Never what came after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deep in the Golden Evening

**Author's Note:**

  * For [V_V_lala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/V_V_lala/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, V_V_lala! I decided to give you some missing scenes from Charles and Sebastian's happy period, at Brideshead and in Venice. I hope you'll enjoy!

I do think about it from time to time - the things that should have come to pass and never did, like sharing a house with Sebastian in Merton Street, or the both of us having happy lives. But as I do not believe either of us was cut out for a happy life, I prefer to revisit what _did_ come to pass, and then only the happy memories. Never the dark and troubled ones. Never what came after.

I did not fall in love with Sebastian the very first moment we met - he made that impossible as he chose that moment to lean in through my window to be sick on my floor - but I am certain I did the next day, when he filled my room with flowers and asked me to lunch. Yes, I fell in love with Sebastian that day, with his beautiful face and eccentric ways, and with his world. I had never known a world where you had champagne in the morning and borrowed things you never intended to return; not even a world where you chose not to attend lectures. If it was irresponsible, it was also a breath of freedom.

To this day, I do not know why Sebastian fell in love with me. To be absolutely truthful, I am not sure that he ever did. But it never occurred to me to doubt it then. I was too infatuated to see it, and it was certainly true that he preferred my company to anyone else's. Perhaps he saw in me a chance to escape those things that made him unhappy, to spend time with someone who had not been charmed by his mother or aspired to marry one of his sisters. Perhaps he saw, as Anthony Blanche liked to say, the artist in me. All I know is that at least for a time, we were allowed a measure of happiness.

*

When I was summoned to Brideshead after Sebastian's Terrible Accident that turned out to be a small, fractured bone in his ankle, I felt I had arrived in Paradise. After the gloomy rooms in my father's house, the parks and meadows seemed to float ethereal in the sunlit space, dappled gold and green.

"Julia says your broken bone is so small it has no name," I said to Sebastian as we lay under the canopy of an oak tree, smoking.

Sebastian shrugged, watching the smoke rise and curl before it vanished. "Aloysius says _all_ bones have names, every single one of them, and as you know he is nearly always right." When he turned his head and smiled at me, my focus was on him absolutely, as if he were the only detailed figure in an otherwise hazy painting. "Do you think Wilcox will let us have champagne tonight?"

I laughed. "That is the kind of problem I enjoy: whether or not to have champagne. The kind of problems you have in Paradise."

Sebastian leaned his head against the tree trunk and glanced up at the canopy, flecks of golden light dancing over his face, and pursed his lips. "Paradise?"

He sounded unusually thoughtful but did not pursue it, and I did not reply. It had been an unhappy choice of words on my part. We chose to ignore it.

_*_

It was one of those long, dusk-blue summer evenings when the air was smooth as silk and moths fluttered around the lights. We had finished one bottle of Château Lafite and started on the next, and had exhausted our descriptions and epithets. "Full-bodied but graceful, a nymph of a wine!" "Velvety rich as the... darkness in a cave." (Sebastian had spluttered a little at that one.) My elbow kept slipping off the polished table and we were laughing at nothing and everything, when the mood changed. Sebastian straightened his back and slowly pushed our glasses out of the way. All the laughter was gone from his face, but there was still a softness there, and the faint buzz of nerves. His eyes were huge in the faint light and his mouth wine-stained.

I knew what was going to happen only a moment before it did, and I welcomed Sebastian's lips on mine, because the desire to kiss him had been driving me quietly insane from the moment I had stepped out of Julia's car and seen Sebastian in his wheelchair. The thought had crossed my mind before, at Oxford, but it had been remote then, unreal, a dream. Here in the green and gold of Brideshead, it became a possibility.

Now, here it was: our first kiss. It tasted of Château Lafite and sent heat to the centre of my body as I marvelled at the softness of Sebastian's lips, the gentleness of his kiss. Afterwards, our breath came fast and our hands trembled too much for us to hold our glasses. We retreated for the night. I lay awake a long time, my head spinning with wine and love, my limbs heavy and my palms hot.

We did not move past kisses, there at Brideshead, not even late at night when we sat on the edge of the fountain, trailing our hands in the dark water creating streaks of glitter on the surface; not even when Sebastian suggested we'd sunbathe naked on the roof. I confess I had to lie on my stomach, both for modesty and to spare me embarrassment. As Sebastian cushioned his head on his arms and closed his eyes as if to sleep, I lay looking at him, the long pale lines of his body, the shimmering smoothness of his skin, and then I, too, closed my eyes.

*

The journey to Venice was long and rough, but we were nineteen years old and in love, and even the clamour, dust and hard benches of a third-class carriage had the feel of an adventure, a luminous edge.

When we arrived at Lord Marchmain's palazzo, we wandered through sharp contrasts of light and dark. The shuttered rooms were deep in shadow and Sebastian's face seemed to float in the air, bodiless and ghostly pale. When the shutters were flung open, the rooms revealed their shape, flooded with light. Luxurious rugs glowed like jewels on the gleaming marble floors, and in the ceiling, reflections of the water in the canal quivered and danced.

There was an air of freedom here, of lenience and a certain disregard for rules. Lord Marchmain lived here with his mistress, after all. But perhaps disregard is not the right word - rather, rules were silently ignored.

Everything seemed close and real here; palpable, tactile, physical. The light made us squint and shade our eyes. Heat clung to our skin.

We took a bottle of cold white wine to Sebastian's room and opened the shutters a fraction to the grand canal. The thin, white curtains billowed in the breeze, and the calls of the gondoliers floated in like sounds from another world. We were scantily dressed in the heat, and by the time the bottle was empty, we had shed what little clothing we'd had on.

It was I who reached out first. I could not help myself. My fingers wanted to wander over Sebastian's perfect, butter-smooth skin and now I let them, allowing them to trace the bones of his wrist and his hip as my tongue found the hollow above his collarbone. Ridges, dips and planes; I was blinded by the beauty of him.

We lay in the enormous four-poster bed in Sebastian's room, under the embroidered canopy among mountains of pillows and rumpled sheets hanging half off the bed, rather like a Baroque style painting, an all-male Rubens.

Inexperienced as I was, I marvelled at the things we did; things I had barely let myself imagine even in the dark of my room at night. I marvelled that Sebastian would allow me to do them, and most of all that he would want to do them to me. There was the first time Sebastian's warm, wet mouth enclosed me and I wanted to lean back on my elbows and never take my eyes off him, but I instead I fell back on the pillows, unable to keep my eyes open, my fists bunching up the sheets as I succumbed to pleasure so intense as to border on pain. There was the wonder of the heat of him in my hand, the silky slide, and the effect of even the smallest movement. I watched his face in awe. That I could make him feel like this. That I could give him this.

No one has seen you like this, I thought with a possessiveness that frightened me. No one but me.

When the bathroom with the antiquated, unreliable geyser chose to do its work and instead of a cold trickle produced cascades of hot water to fill a bath, we would lie together in the tub smoking, with Sebastian's back on my chest. The steam settled on our skin to form heavy drops that I smoothed off Sebastian's shoulders with my hands or my tongue. In reply he tilted his head back until our eyes could meet, very close, and we smiled at a secret shared.

Out on the canals and in the streets we touched each other continuously, sometimes surreptitiously and at other times openly - arm in arm, hand on back, fingers touching. What we did, what we were was not a crime here, and it gave us a light-headed sense of freedom that we were still wary to misuse. We lit our cigarettes on each other's, a vicarious kiss when in public, and we were drowning in honey, stingless.

*

"I wish we did not have to leave," I said as we lay in Sebastian's Rubenesque bed so late one night that it was nearly morning.

Something in his face closed and he turned away, stubbing out his cigarette in the crystal tray on the table. "Don't talk about it, Charles, please. Let us just be happy. Reality will hit soon enough."

Of course Sebastian was right, because that is the nature of reality. But before it did, we had more days of sunshine and frescoes, marble and sea, of rain and clouds over the Lido, of rocking gondolas and sparkling prosecco on the balcony before dinner. We had more nights in our rumpled sheets, with skin sliding over sweaty skin and the dark oblivion of pleasure.

When it was time for us to travel back to England, we set out our journey as the sun began to set, leaning back in our seats to watch the city glow and sparks fly off turrets and spires. Once, in Oxford, Sebastian had said he wanted to bury a crock of gold in every place where he had been happy. I had never been as happy anywhere as I had been here in Venice, and I felt I had buried crocks of gold in every room of the palazzo, under every bridge we had crossed, under the paving of every piazza where the pigeons had cooed and tourists flocked. Perhaps, one day, I would return and unearth them.

Beside me Sebastian closed his eyes, and we sat in silence as we left Venice and travelled north, deep in the golden evening.


End file.
